


the sun persists in rising (so I make myself stand)

by everyperfectsummer



Series: LOSF Diversity Week [1]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-12-12 09:05:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11733939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyperfectsummer/pseuds/everyperfectsummer
Summary: Barry doesn’t want to kill himself, exactly. It’s complicated.





	the sun persists in rising (so I make myself stand)

**Author's Note:**

> Please be kind to yourselves and don’t read this if you think it might trigger you! Also please tell me if there’s a trigger here that I should tag!

He’s not sure exactly when it started. It’d be easy to blame it on his mother’s death and his father’s subsequent framing, and several of his therapists have tried to do so, but. Oh, sometimes he agrees with them, thinks that maybe his parents would’ve made all the difference, but sometime’s he’s sure that he’d be like this no matter what. By “this” he means semi-suicidal. Not outright actively suicidal, in and out of the hospital with several attempts under his belt, but instead, like a therapist had once told him, aggressively passively suicidal.

 

He’s not likely to step in front of a bus, but he’s not likely to step out of the way of one, either. He’s not going to go out of the way to kill himself, he doesn’t want to die, but he doesn’t want to live, either. So he doesn’t wear seatbelts or look both ways before crossing the street, and even though his therapist doesn’t know about those details, he still has to get way more therapy than Joe can frankly afford because his therapist says the alternative is hospitalization, which they can afford even less, and...well, the hospital seems a lot like prison, from what Barry’s heard, in that you  _ can’t leave _ until they say you can, and honestly he’d rather be dead than locked up against his will. 

 

He’d rather be dead than a lot of things. Honestly, he’s not sure why people are so against it. Joe and his therapist both use the example of his mother, of how it was horrible when she died so it’d be horrible if he died, too. 

 

They don’t get it. He’s not like his mother. He doesn’t have a kid or a husband who love him and would mourn him, doesn’t have the same sort of gravity about him, isn’t, really, nearly as important as she was. He knows the Wests would miss him but. It wouldn’t be as bad for them, not really. He’s more of a burden than a help to them, in the long run, and he knows that if he were a better person he’d have killed himself long ago to stop bothering them, stop bothering everyone, but. He can’t quite make himself do it, no matter how close he’s gotten. So he’s stuck living, stuck inflicting his presence on the people around him, and that just makes it all worse.

 

It’s both easier and harder after he gets struck by lightning. With him being stuck in a coma for 9 months, his therapist had stopped keeping a slot open for him. Joe had half heartedly reminded to him to make an appointment sometime, but with everything that happened – well, at first he just forgot to make the appointment and then, after he remembered, it had stopped being possible. 

 

What was he supposed to tell his old therapist, or any therapist? I still have nightmares about my mother’s supervillain killer from the future? I wish I wasn’t a hero so that I could die without it hurting anyone else? I’m glad I am a hero, because of so many things but at least partially because I won’t have to worry about living a long time? 

 

The hero thing makes it better and worse. On the one hand, risking his life goes from being pointless and stupid to being brave and heroic, being something he gets praised for, something people like. On the other, he has people depending on him. If – when – he dies, his family and friends and Central in general won’t have anyone to protect them. And he can’t bear the thought of that. 

 

So when he goes into battle, he tries his hardest to come out of it alive. Or at least, he tries to try his hardest. It…doesn’t always work out that way. He tells one of his best friends that she has to kill him in order to leave. Everyone else thinks he’s gambling on the strength of their friendship, on the love Caitlin has for him and the rest of team Flash after everything, but the truth is he’d be ok with either option, with her coming back to the fold or her freezing him to death. He offers himself to the Dominators, one last sacrifice to save the world, a true hero’s death, only to have it ripped away from him. He kills himself, or a time remnant of himself, to defeat Zoom, kills himself quite literally defeating Savitar. He goes to every crime that’s committed, every minor mugging and planet wide battle knowing he should come out and wishing he won’t.

 

At the same time that the heroism means he’s necessary to protect the people around him, it also means he’s making the lives of the people around him worse. He resets the timeline, and then resets it again, changing things forever, for all of them. His friends say they forgive him, and even act like they do, but he knows they shouldn’t, knows he deserves to be hated for the rest of his days for the hurt he’s caused them, knows he should stop having days at all to stop hurting them, knows the balance is tipping closer and closer to death as the best option for those around him as well as for him.

 

He’s not going to kill himself tomorrow, or anything. He just…wishes he wouldn’t make it to tomorrow. He knows that part of him wants to live, part of him that waxes and wanes in size and strength from day to day, just as he knows that another part of him doesn’t want to at all. But living every day feels like he’s carrying all the suffering he’s ever felt around with him, feels cloudy and hopeless and grey and he doesn’t want to do it anymore, doesn’t want to have to. He’s just. He’s so tired. He just wants it to stop. 

 

He doesn’t know what the right choice is, and he isn’t brave enough to make it either way. So he keep on living by default, but. He’s not sure how much longer he can keep doing this.


End file.
